It’s time to speak up for Postal Service

By Fredric Rolando

Your newspaper has done an exemplary job covering the efforts by local political leaders to fight the U.S. Postal Service’s ill-advised efforts to degrade mail service in eastern Idaho (not to mention in numerous other regions across the country).
And the political leaders in your region should be commended for their willingness to stand up for the best interests of the families and businesses they represent by stopping service cuts that would hurt the region and cost jobs. As you noted, they’re trying to enlist Idaho’s representatives in Washington in this effort.
Your March 22 story, however, contained a comment suggesting the Postal Service could avert the cuts if it slowed down “repayment of their retirement plan debts.” That implies that the Postal Service would need special treatment to stop the cuts — special treatment in the form of a pass from repaying normal retiree obligations.
In fact, the opposite is true — the Postal Service is being forced to do something no other entity in the country has to do. Understanding this is key to understanding why folks in eastern Idaho face the loss of critical services.
The Postal Service doesn’t need special treatment — it just needs the same treatment every other company or agency receives. Instead, it gets a type of unique treatment that has caused the very problems your local officials seek to prevent — including the potential closing of the Pocatello mail processing plant in April.
In 2006, a lame-duck Congress mandated that the Postal Service pre-fund future retiree health benefits. Consider this: No one else is required to pre-fund for even one year. But the Postal Service has to cover costs 75 years into the future and pay for it all over a 10-year period. That $5.6 billion annual charge is the red ink.
So it’s not that letter carriers and others who want to maintain strong postal services want a special deal for the Postal Service. On the contrary, we want an end to the special — and unfair — treatment USPS now gets. All the more because USPS already has put aside $50 billion for future retiree health benefits, meaning those costs now are covered for several decades ahead — something few if any agencies or businesses can say.
Were it not for this onerous pre-funding charge, the narrative would be of a federal agency that, without a dime of taxpayer money, facing a still soft economy as well as the challenges of the Internet that have led to online bill-paying, is highly profitable. And people in eastern Idaho would be looking forward to better and faster mail service.
As your story noted, the Postal Service had an operating profit of more than $1.3 billion in just the first few months of Fiscal Year 2015. And that follows fiscal 2014’s $1.4 billion operating profit.
Don’t be fooled by those who claim the pre-funding issue is a red herring because in recent years the Postal Service hasn’t been able to make those payments. It’s true that sometimes those annual charges haven’t been paid – but it’s also irrelevant to the point I’m making. Whether it’s paid or not in a given year, the annual $5.6 billion goes on the ledger sheet as a charge — creating the manufactured ‘red ink’ that some in Washington now hope to exploit in a bid to deprive Americans of postal services they’ve long relied on and continue to need and deserve.
Making this all the more problematic is that the reductions in service the Postal Service and some lawmakers are pushing — closing your mail processing plant and 81 others, ending Saturday mail delivery or replacing door-to-door delivery with ‘cluster boxes’ in the neighborhood — wouldn’t only hurt residents, they’d also hurt the Postal Service itself.
That’s because they’d drive away mail and revenue from an agency that supports itself by earning its own money.
And they’d cost jobs in the Gem State, where 62,923 residents have private-sector jobs in the mailing industry that depends on a strong, six-day-a-week Postal Service. Meanwhile, 273,033 Idahoans work for small businesses, which would see costs rise if they had to contract with private carriers to receive checks on weekends.
This is the time for people in eastern Idaho and throughout your beautiful state to speak out about preserving your postal services. If Idaho’s representatives in Washington hear you, if they apply their common sense, if they focus on the best interests of the residents and business owners they represent — if they simply consider the facts — they will work to strengthen the postal networks and to remedy the problems that Congress itself caused.

Fredric Rolando is the president of the National Association of Letter Carriers.

8 comments - What do you think?
Posted by
ifennell -
March 29, 2015 at 1:24 am

The Investment Bankers schemes to bankrupt companies or Corporations like the US Postal Service to raid the assets and steal the employee deferred wages namely the Defined Benefit Pension funds that the US Postal employees have contributed over 50 years since WWII is the motive behind the $5 Billion infusion of money into the Pension Fund, snuck in during the Bush Lame Duck session of Congress. Just a little ol amendment to a bill, to fund a pension 75 years.

Just another scheme to use Legislation to get to the pension funds of employees. Mitt Romney made his fortune using similar schemes. What most people do not realize is that when a Company is forced into bankruptcy, the Federal Conservative Federal Judges rule that the Pension funds can be used to pay off the debt and creditors. Usually the employees who were counting on the pension for retirement, find themselves joining the 55 million in the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp, with a pension having half value, no health benefit, and no possibility of a COLA.

When the Post Office goes into bankruptcy, the employees will NOT benefit, at all.

The Huge Defined Benefit Pension fund of the US Post Office is the Prize waiting to be plucked once the Post Office is forced into bankruptcy (NO cash to meet its bills after putting $5 Billion Congress mandated funding).
These type of schemes to gain access to the Pension funds by Investment Bankers was exposed in the book ‘Retirement Heist” by Ellen Schultz a few years ago. Every Postal employee needs to read this book and then it will make sense of why the Post Office is in danger of Bankruptcy. Just follow the money.

The company I worked for for 32 years sold the company to a company in France and the PBGC looked the other way, Mike. We got nothing from them and haven’t got anything since. My step parent worked for UPRR and it went into bankruptcy and what funds remained went into Social Security and amounted to about 10% of the funds left. He lived on SS plus 10% for spending about 40 working on the railroad. Translates to about $10 per year worked.

So, I’m toast and my family was toast but MikeMathews gets what? Only fair he gets what everyone else has gotten previously.

The U.S. Government can’t be trusted in that respect. Make the Post Office a private corporation.

Same as I did, 17% on the dollar after we gave up on the PBGC and went after the thief’s ourselves.

Here is PBGC site. Last I checked, since the Corporation was established by Congress, there are 44 million, mainly baby boomers who were put in the Retirement pool after their pensions were stolen with schemes like Merger and Acquisitions and bankrupted, the model of Bain Capital.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation protects the retirement incomes of more than 44 million American workers. Find out more about us, including how we’re governed, how we’re organized, and the customers we serve.

I read somewhere the people in PBGC was 55 million but that was a few years ago, maybe 11 million have already died before and after their 65th birthday.

Over $7 Trillion dollars has been stolen with schemes of bankruptcy since 1980. To put $7 trillion in perspective, in 1980 the value of all the Home Equity in the USA was $10 Trillion and the value of the DB pension funds in 1980 was also $10 Trillion. The USA total wealth was $80 Trillion in 1980.

The Billions of Dollars of the Wall Street Bankers came from the robbed pension funds. Pretty clever scheme they had and it has worked for more than 3 decades and the US Post Office is one of the few DB Pension funds left.

I agree, members of Congress has turned a blind eye to Pension theft. Must be the money they from the Lobbyists with the jingle of bags of money lurking in the halls of Congress.

In fairness, there are some good people in Congress but unfortunately, in the minority.

Here is what the US Post Office employees can expect if the US Post Office goes bankrupt.
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